


A Waking Dream of Water

by frith_in_thorns



Series: Free of Surface Ties [6]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Dreams, F/M, North, Seeking Mr Eaten, bad life choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-29
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 09:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2686928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Those who seek the Name lose body, soul and mind. Yet many do…</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Waking Dream of Water

Elizabeth never intended to become one of the Seekers. They were shunned by society and the underclasses alike; those hollow-eyed men and women and others who had sacrificed their souls and their very souls in the quest for the Name.

She was intelligent, and well educated, and her life in the Neath was good. Their fate wouldn't be hers.

Not if she was careful.

It began for her in dreams. No: it began in study, in sweltering coffee-houses full of anarchists and radicals from Benthic College keeping rowdy debates over the precise meanings of forbidden Correspondence sigils thundering on into the early hours as the candles burned low. _A deep place to hide sins._ Or, _A star shining brightest in destruction._ Monographs were scrawled on the back of bills and music-hall flyers as scholars shouted each other down until their throats were raw. Elizabeth left only at false-dawn, when the owner finally kicked them out, and would stumble home too exhilarated to recognise her exhaustion, head full of theories and bylines.

In contrast, the dreams were almost silent in their stillness. Like a flock of bats they circled her, approaching cautiously at first, one every few nights. Alone on a ship, standing beside but not touching the wheel, she zailed the uncharted peligan deeps of the Unterzee. The black waves lapped softly at the hull, and softly broke around other, unseen things out there in the dark distance. Sometimes the waves were rimmed with ice, and frost spun its way along the spider-lines of the rigging.

From the beginning she never had to wonder where she was sailing to, although she never gave the destination voice even in the solitude of her own head as the dreams circled more thickly, settling on her more frequently, more confidently.

One morning she woke with her hands and feet so cold she could barely move them. Peter stirred at her alarm and he stoked up the fire and enveloped her in his own warmth until feeling returned. He was worried, eyes full of questions she couldn't answer. Wouldn't answer.

There were other signs too. Urchins sang a skipping-rhyme about candles and she stopped to listen, waiting with fascinated dread for them to reach the seventh verse — but the game always seemed to break apart just before it ever arrived. Hurrying down an alley once she could swear she caught sight of the arched back and mad eyes of a Starveling Cat. And then there was the well.

The well drew her. She began altering her routes to try and avoid it, but somehow she always seemed to find her feet leading her there, to Big King Square where the Rubbery Men and the honey-mazed and the hollow-eyed beggars clustered. She sidled up to it, and looked inside, and its obsidian depths were both terrifying and horribly alluring.

Also, she thought she could hear the rough edge of a voice drifting up from the depths; a harsh, broken voice, whispering appalling secrets.

_…the drowning…_

She dreamed herself in the gondola of a dirigible, flying by cold moonlight high and silent over a flooded desert. Flying North, which had been her destination all along.

"Where does a candle-flame go," she whispered to Peter, still half-submerged in sleep, "when its light is extinguished?"

"It doesn't matter," he said, and took her hands, squeezing them tightly. There was no moon outside their window. Only darkness. "El, it's not safe to ask things like that."

But there had been a betrayal long ago, one written in water, and it was waking to shape her fate. Peter's eyes begged her not to leave, but eventually she would. A hunger had awoken in her which couldn't be sated.

_North._


End file.
